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THE USURER 



IN 



ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 



BY 

Arthur bivins stonex 



THESIS 

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of 

THE University of Pennsylvania in Partial 

Fulfilment of the Requirements \ 

for the Degree of Doctor 

of Philosophy 



[ Reprinted from the Publications of the Modern Language Association 
of America., vol. XXXI, no. 2, June, 1916] 



JUL la 19''® 



THE USUEEE IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 

Jeremy Beutliain in his iconoclastic Defence of Usury 
offers this plausible if somewhat cynical explanation of the 
well-nigh universal unpopularity of the money lender: 
" Those who have the resolution to sacrifice the present to 
the future, are natural objects of envy to those who have 
sacrificed the future to the present. The children who have 
eaten their cake, are the natural enemies of the children 
who have theirs." ^ And similarly he explains the un- 
happy role that is almost as universally meted out to the 
money lender of drama. " It is the business of the drama- 
tist," he says, " to study and to conform to, the humors and 
passions of those on the pleasing of whom he depends for 
his success. . . NTow I question whether, among all the 
instances in which a borrower and a lender of money have 
been brought together upon the stage, from the days of 
Thespis to the present, there ever was one, in which the 
former was not recommended to favour in some shape or 
other — either to admiration, or to love, or to pity, or to 
all three ; — and the other, the man of thrift, consigned to 
infamy." ^ 

However loath one may be to accept this theory of " the 
business of the dramatist," one has to confess that his prac- 
tice often seems to be what is here stated ; and there is no 
getting away from the fact that Bentham has described the 
typical treatment accorded both the money lender and the 
money borrower of drama, certainly of the English drama 
at its greatest period. Indeed, a reading of the more than 

* Defence of Usury. Letter x, John Bowring's edition of Bentham's 
Works, vol. ni, p. 17. 
^ Ibid. 

190 



THE USUKEE IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 191 

sixty plays ^ in which these characters appear, written dur- 
ing the ninety years following 1553, reveals an analogous 
similarity of the very devices used by the dramatists to 
bring about the desired conclusion. Further, by reading 
the plays in approximately chronological order, it is even 
possible to trace an apparent evolution of these devices 
from a crude and literal deus ex machina in the morality 
plays to two very popular deae ex machina who flourished 
in numerous amusing and highly complicated comedies of 
the Elizabethan and Jacobean heydey. It is also possible, 
thus, to come to a new realization may be, not so much of 
the unabashed persistency with which Elizabethan drama- 
tists, great and small, " went and took " characters, situa- 
tions, and whole plots from one another, as of the resource- 
ful ingenuity with which they altered and varied their 
borrowings. 

The source of the rather surprisingly ubiquitous usurer 
of English drama is far from certain. William Poel, in 
his Shakespeare in the Theatre, of 1913, says, " Now if we 
go back to the Latin comedies and consider the origin of 
the money lenders, we find a type of character similar to 
that of Shylock. Moliere's Harpagon who is modelled on 
the miser of Plautus, has a strong resemblance to Bar abas 
and Shylock." ^ But the money lender and the miser are 
very different personages in Latin comedy. The typical 
Plautine money lender, for example, is not miserly; and, 
though the typical usurer of Elizabethan drama is, it does 
not seem likely that he is an exotic compound of these two 

^ Forty-five of the seventy-one plays that I have found containing 
or seeming to contain usurers are mentioned or described in one 
connection or another in this paper. In the remaining twenty-six, 
either the usurer is an unimportant cliaracter or his usviriousness 
is incidental or even doubtful. 

*Page 75. 



192 ARTHUR BlVIlSrS STONEX 

quite distinct characters. In the few cases where they 
were certainly transplanted, their differences were main- 
tained. The miser, Jacques, of Jonson's The Case is Al- 
tered, far from lending his money even at usurious rates, 
hides it, as does his Plautine prototype, Euclio, of the 
Aulularia.^ And the usurer, in Hey wood's The English 
Traveler, who is even to his language, a translation of the 
Banker in the Mostellaria,^ and who may be taken as a fair 
representation of the typical Plautine money lender, is 
unlike his English brethren in being portrayed as not 
miserly at all, or as in other ways objectionable. Indeed, 
neither the Plautine miser nor the Plautine money lender 
is markedly similar to the Elizabethan stage usurer in 
the latter's almost distinguishing characteristics: his 
villainy, his cruelty, his loathsomeness, and the contempt 
and hatred with which he is regarded. In these re- 
spects, the Plautine procurer comes much closer ; and it is 
possibly significant that these roles are actually combined 
in Security in Eastiuard Hoe. However, no one of these 
three characters in Roman comedy ever appears in a plot 
strongly suggestive of those which soon came to be the al- 
most invariable vehicles in which the Elizabethan usurers 
ran their ignominious careers. Certainly, there seems to 
be no tangible basis for Poel's assertion that in The Mer- 
chant of Venice, " Shakespeare thrusts the conventional 
usurer of the old Latin comedy into a play of love and 
chance." '^ 

After finding that many Elizabethan descriptions of the 
physical appearance, the dress, and the personal habits of 
the usurer were modelled closely on mediaeval deserip- 

^ For a discussion of the indebtedness, see Cunningham's edition 
of Gifford's The Works of Ben Jonson, 1875, vol. vi, pp. 328, 345, 350. 
* See Eeinhardstoettner's Plautus, especially pp. 469-474. 
'L. c, p. 70. 



THE USURER IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 193 

tions of Avarice,^ particularly upon realizing the close 
spiritual affinity between the two, I was led to look to 
the Avaritia who appears , so often in the morality plays 
as the prototype of the usurer of the later drama. And 
here it is possible to trace a line of descent, but a line so 
faint and uncertain that it can be suggested as only a not 
improbable hypothesis. Dr. Walter Reinicke, whose trea- 
tise I did not come across until after I had completed my 
researches, says that out of the old morality drama, " Eine 
Menge typischer Gestalten treten uns entgegen, und unter 
ihiien befindet sich auch der Wucherer." ^ He, however, 
gives no example except the Usurer in Lodge and Greene's 
A LooMng-Glass for London and England to support his 
statement, and he does not suggest an evolution from 
Avarice, or any other similar character of the moralities, 
to this relatively late dramatic usurer. 

In the political-morality play, Respuhlica, of 1553, there 
is an Avarice who has filled one of his thirteen purse-s 
with the " intresse of thys yeares userie." ^° And Greed- 
inesse, in George Wapull's The Tide Tarrieth No Man, 
written probably much earlier than 1576, the date of the 
earliest extant edition, is unmistakably and aggressively 
a usurer. M:oreover, several other characters of this old 
play were to appear in most of the subsequent usurer plays, 
the prodigal, here a courtier, his evil associates, symbolized 
in Corage, " the Vice," and the broker, appropriately 

* Compare, for example, Lodge's Wits Miserie, pp. 27, 28, Hunterian 
Club edition, and The Vision of Piers Plowman, Skeat's edition, vol. 
1, B Text, Passus v, p. 146, 11. 190-199, and The Romaunt of the 
Rose, 11. 207-246. These partial parallels were brought to my atten- 
tion in Professor E. D. McDonald's An Example of Plagiarism among 
Elizabethan Pamphleteers, Indiana University Studies, vol. rx, no. 8. 

* Der Wucherer im dlteren englischen Drama. Halle Dissertation, 
1907, p. 6. 

" Act III, sc. vi. 



194 ARTHUR BIVINS STONEX 

named Hurtfull-Helpe. And the usurer himself has most 
of the disagreeable traits of his successors and like them 
comes to a miserable end, though whether by " a greate 
fit " or " the new sicknesse " is not entirely clear. There 
is not in the play, however, any hint of the characteristic 
devices by which the overthrow of the usurer was later to 
be accomplished. 

Nor were such devices employed in the next three plays, 
all belated moralities, in which usurers appear and come 
to richly merited confusion, Robert Wilson's The Three 
Ladies of London, 1583, its sequel. The Three Lords and 
Ladies of London, written between 1585 and 1588, and 
Lodge and Greene's A Looking Glass for London and Eng- 
land, of 1589.^^ In the first two, in company with Simony, 
Fraud, and Dissimulation, appears Usury, who has come 
from Venice to serve Lady Lucre. After a series of ingeni- 
ously symbolic acts, such as undoing Plain-Dealing, cutting 
the throat of Hospitality, attempting to slay Liberality, and 
" covering Conscience with Fraud's cloak very cunningly," 
he is arrested and branded with '' a little x standing in the 
midst of a great C — to let men understand. That you must 
not take above ten pound in the hundred at any hand." ^^ 
The Usurer in A Looking Glass is less of an allegorical 
abstraction than the Usury of the Wilson plays, as his 
name possibly would indicate. Instead of undoing Plain- 
Dealing and Conscience, he ruins Thrasybulus, a young 
gentleman, and Alcon, a poor peasant. And he also comes 
to a more theatric though scarcely as probable an end by 

" Unless the main outlines of it have been preserved in The Mer- 
chant of Venice, we can know nothing of the nature of The Je^o, which 
was being acted at The Bull in 1579, beyond Stephen Gosson's de- 
scription of it as "representing the greediness of wortdly choosers, 
and the bloody minds of usurers" (School of Abuse, Shakespeare 
Society edition, p. 29). 

" Dodsley's Old Plays, Hazlitt's edition, vol. vi, p. 381. 



THE USURER IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 195 

appearing in the last act to return his ill-gotten gains with 
a halter in one hand and a dagger in the other, " groaning 
in conscience " because he believes he is " stumbling " 
over the " bleeding ghosts " of his many victims. 

Marlowe's Jew of Malta, of 1589-1590, is the play that 
most clearly marks the transition from the old to the new 
dramatic portrayals of incarnate avarice. Tor one thing, 
the incarnation has at last gained a man's name. From 
Avarice, through Greediness, Usury, and a Usurer, Barabas 
has finally emerged, and Shylock is soon to come. In addi- 
tion, Barabas is more than personified avarice, even if he 
does seem less a person than the complex and human Shy- 
lock. There is, nevertheless, in the play the intense seri- 
ousness and much of the didactic purpose and method of 
the earlier writers; though here again the Jew of Malta 
points forward as well as back. Several of the merriest of 
the later usurer comedies, such as Jonson's and Middle- 
ton's, retain something of both the earnestness and 
didactic intent of the morality play, and such 
creatures as Dekker's Bartervile, in // it he not Good, 
the Devil is in it, Massinger's Overreach, and Pertenax, 
of Francis Quarles's The Virgin Widow, have much 
in common with Barabas, the Usurer of Lodge and 
Greene's creating, and the still earlier Greediness, not 
only in the lesson and in the frightfulness of their final 
taking off, but in their abstractness as well. In fact the 
names, Bartervile and Overreach, show that allusive and 
symbolic names did not die out with Marlowe ; Sir Moth 
Interest, Mamon, Lucre, Hoard, Scrape, Gripe, Blood- 
hound, Hog, and Vermine were all to follow. Marlowe's 
most fruitful contribution, however, at least to the develop- 
ment of the plot of the usurer play, was the introduction 
of a rebellious daughter, a heroine who later was to become 
almost a dea ex machine both in the overthrow of her 



196 AETHUK BIVINS STONEX 

usurious father, the villain, and the salvation of her prod- 
igal lover, the hero. 

Even this, which soon came to be a frankly comic plot, 
was nevertheless related to one of the oldest and most 
persistent of all the themes of the morality drama, the 
istory and the lesson of the prodigal son.^^ A usurer is 
often the means by which a prodigal comes to his downfall 
and reformation. The witty Thomas !Nashe read this 
interpretation into the original version of the story itself: 
" The Prodigall-child in the Gospell is reported to have 
fedde Hogges, that is, Usurers, by letting them beguile 
hym of his substance." ^^ And that the dramatists who 
made the most grossly comic utilization of this theme, even 
at a late date, were not unaware of the sacred source is 
possibly indicated by a passage in Shirley's The Constant 
Maid, of 1636 to 1639. A usurer there warns a friend 
not to have " either in arras or in picture the story of the 
prodigal " lest it frighten young gentlemen from spending 
their portions. ^^ The prodigal-usurer play bears close re- 
semblance to the Biblical story in another detail than the 
one suggested by Nashe, the often scandalous " happy end- 
ing." It must be noted, however, that the fatted calf in 
the Bible story is not killed until after the prodigal repents 
and returns, while in the drama the reward usually pre- 
cedes the reformation. In fact, Timon of Athens is almost 
unique among the plays in which the usurer and the prod- 
igal appear, in that Timon pays the just penalty of his 
foolish extravagance. 

The typical and excellent comic situation in the prod- 
igal-usurer play is this: A young spendthrift, who has 

" See Professor Schelling's Elizabethan Drama, vol. i, p. 63. 
" Christs Teares Over Jerusalem, R. B. McKerrow's edition of 
Nashe's Works, vol. ii, p. 100. 
"Act I, sc. i. 



THE USURER IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 197 

become heavily indebted, or has actually lost his property, 
to a usurer, comes into his own, or the other's, property 
by eloping with the usurer's daughter and by carrying off 
anything else of value he or his mistress can lay hands on, 
money, jewels, or the mortgage itself. A somewhat similar 
though really distinct and later device for undoing the 
usurer, either bachelor or widower, and rescuing the hero 
was the introduction of an heiress whose hand both should 
seek, but of course the prodigal should eventually win.- 
There is practically no end to the dexterous changes 
that were wrought in these two basic groupings of char- 
acters and events. It is not, however, the present purpose 
to point out the ways in which most of the sixty and more 
dramas conformed to these protean plots, nor, indeed, to 
enumerate all the permutations and combinations that re- 
sulted from them. It may suffice merely to show some of 
the more important developments in the growth of the two 
main plots and to describe some of the later plays that 
illustrate the clever uses and changes of the stock situa- 
tions and characters that came to be the stage usurer's 
almost inseparable accessories. 

Marlowe's contribution to the first of the plots just 
described, the introduction of a rebellious daughter, was 
slight. Abigail in The Jew of Malta does not elope with 
one of her father's debtors or with a young prodigal; 
in fact, she enters a monastery. And her rebelliousness is 
only indirectly if at all responsible for her father's final 
overthrow. But in The Merchant of Venice, four years 
later, ^® the rebellious daughter goes farther. She does 
elope and she carries with her a part of her father's treas- 

" There are no contributions to the usurer plot or to the portrayal 
of the usurer in two plays of 1592, A Knack to Know a Knave, and 
Nobody and Somebody, in both of which appear characters who are, 
quite incidentally, usurers. 



V 



198 ARTHUR BIVINS STONEX 

ure, and, though she does not bring about her father's 
downfall, she and her lover are connected with the group 
who do. And, again, though Jessica does not elope with 
her father's debtor, nor, apparently, with a prodigal,^'^ 
both a debtor and a prodigal are in the play. The latter, 
moreover, retrieves his fortune and that of his friend by 
marrying an heiress. If Bassanio had borrowed from 
Shylock, had eloped with Jessica, and had, in addition to 
money and jewels, carried off possibly the bond also, the 
first type of the usurer-prodigal plot would have been 
evolved as early as 1594 or 1595. And the elements at 
least of the other were inherent in this play ; Shylock might 
have been one of the unsitccessful suitors for the hand and 
inheritance of Portia. 

In A Knack to Know an Honest Man, first acted in 
1594, a rebellious daughter once more appears to thwart 
the plans of a usurious father. She does not elope with a 
prodigal debtor, but she releases two prisoners from her 
father's house, whose capture and confinement were appar- 
ently expected to yield profit. Eventually she marries one 
of these young men, and thus makes an appreciable advance 
toward the completion of the earlier of the two chief usurer- 
prodigal plots. 

Further advances were made in Wily Beguiled, written 
" not long after 1596." ^^ The daughter of the merciless 
usurer, Gripe, elopes, this time with a poor scholar, Sophos. 
He is not one of Gripe's debtors, and so the final step in 
the development of the most frequent later plot is yet to 
be taken, but there are several innovations in this play 
that were to be widely imitated in succeeding usurer plays. 
For the first time, the " gull " appears as the suitor favored 

" Note, however, Lorenzo's description of himself as " an unthrift 
love" (V, i, 21). 
" Malone Society Reprint, p. vii. 



THE USURER IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 199 

by the father, here in the person of Peter Plodall, son of 
a rich and conscienceless extortioner and landlord, a kind 
of second usurer. Another innovation, followed at least 
twice, is the introduction of a usurer's worthy and humane 
son, as if in fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecy, 
frequently in the mouths of Elizabethan preachers and 
reformers, " He that by usury and unjust gain increaseth 
his substance, he shall -gather it for him that will pity the 
poor." ^^ More often this son is a dupe, comparable to 
Peter, or a profligate who would be as sore a thorn in the 
usurer's flesh as a generous son. Another means of undoing 
the villain, an accomplice who turns traitor, though remi- 
niscent of Ithamore in The Jew of Malta, may fairly be 
regarded as a further innovation made by Wily Beguiled, 
especially because the accomplice is here a rascally lawyer 
and because he is woven more closely into the plot by being 
made another discomfited wooer of the heroine. More- 
over, false magic is, for the first time I believe, introduced. 
In this play Robin Goodfellow appears as a devil, to em- 
barrass the elopement of hero and heroine, but he is, need- 
less to say, unsuccessful. Later and successful utilizations 
of false magic were for the purpose of undoing or convert- 
ing the usurer. The feature of Wily Beguiled that is used 
most frequently in later usurer plays, however, is the final 
repentance of the usurer and his reconciliation to the en- 
forced son-in-law and the erring daughter. 

In the next usurer play of which I have knowledge, 
William Ilaughton'is Englishmen for my Money, of 1597- 
1598, the rebellious daughter motif has reached its full 
development. In fact, the situation has been so cleverly 
complicated that one is compelled to wonder if some simpler 
form had not intervened, or if some foreign model had not 

^^ Proverbs, xxvni, 8. 



200 AETHUR BIVINS STONEX 

been utilized.^" Pisaro, the usurer, has three daughters 
whom he plans to marry to three rich foreign merchants. 
The daughters are in love with as many young English 
prodigals who have " pawned . . . their livings and their 
lands "2^ to Pisaro. The action of the play — and there 
is a plenty — consists in devices for outwitting the father 
and the three foreign dupes by the elopement of the daugh- 
ters with the three English debtors. At the end, as in Wily 
Beguiled, the usuring father repents, accepts his unwel- 
come sons-in-law, and restores their property to them. 
If Thomas Hej^'wood's The Fair Maid of the Exchange, 

^ So far as I can discover, no source has been found for any one 
of these plays, or at least for the portions of them that would 
thus seem to reveal a natural evolution of the rebellious daughter 
device. What Marlowe may have called upon beyond his own fertile 
imagination is not known. Curiously, the Jessica-Lorenzo episode 
is not a part of the Italian novel, II Pecorone, usually regarded as 
the ultimate source of The Merchant of Venice; and, though a fairly 
close analogue of the episode has been pointed out in Massuccio di 
Salerno's Fourteenth Tale — page 319 of the New Variorum edition of 
The Merchant of Venice — there is no other evidence that Shakespeare 
was familiar with the work of that author. The editor of the 
Malone Society reprint of A Knack to Know an Honest Man thinks 
that the name of one of the characters " suggests the possibility of 
an Italian source" (p. xi) ; and the editor of the same Society's 
reprint of Wily Beguiled does no more than point out certain obvious 
imitations of The Merchant of Venice. Dr. Albert C. Baugh, of the 
University of Pennsylvania, after a most painstaking search, is 
unable to find a source of the main plot of Englishmen for My Money. 
The " possibility of an Italian source " of any or all of these plays 
is strong, but thus far I have found none, nor have the several 
scholars, intimately familiar with the Italian literature of the 
period, to whom Dr. Baugh and I have appealed. Of course the 
prodigal, and the rebellious daughter, especially the daughter who 
refuses to marry the man of parental choice, are old and persistent 
characters in literature. It may not be too much to credit the 
slight if dexterous modifications of their r6les to meet the exigencies 
of the usurer play to a combination of English inventiveness and 
eclecticism. 

'^Act I, sc. i. 



THE USURER IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA. 201 

probably written in 1602, or, still better, Robert Tailor's 
The Hog Hath Lost His Pearl, of 1613, bad only preceded 
Haughton's comedy, it would have been possible to show 
an entirely regular evolution of the role of the rebellious 
daughter in the usurer play from the first uncertain step 
in The Jew of Malta to the delightful complexity of Eng- 
lishmen for My Money. Moll, a character in the subplot 
of Heywood's play, and daughter of the usurer. Berry, 
marries Bernard, in debt to her father and frowned upon 
by him. At the end Berry relents, receives the profligate 
son-in-law, and returns to him his mortgage. In Tailor's 
play, the hero, Haddit, a young prodigal whose land is also 
mortgaged to a usurer. Hog, also carries off the daughter 
and some of the usurer's money as well, and is likewise 
pardoned and accepted by the eventually reformed Hog. 
Here there is false magic in the form of " spirits " con- 
jured up to aid in the elopement and the robbery. One of 
the last of the usurer plays to appear before the closing of 
the theatres, Richard Brome's The Damoiselle, or the New 
Ordinary, written in 1637 or 1638, makes use of the same 
general plot and group of characters. Vermine, a late and 
loathsome descendant of Avarice, has ruined by egregious 
usury, one Brokeall. After many complications, Brokeall's 
son marries the usurer's run-away daughter, gains his 
father-in-law's reluctant blessing, and regains his father's 
property as dowry. The usurer's son reappears also, here 
a combination of the two most persistent traits of that 
character, gullibility and profligacy. These three plays 
may be regarded as exemplifications of the simplest form 
of the plot containing the usurer, his rebellious daughter, 
and the prodigal, and come logically, if not chronologi- 
cally, before Haughton's triple complication of it. To take 
further liberties with the chronological order, Shackerly 
Marmion's A Fine Companion, of 1633, marks the next 



202 ARTHUR BlVIlSrS STONEX 

stage of development. Here the usurer, Littlegood, has 
two daughters whom he plans to marry to two men of 
property, one of them Dotario, an old miser. However, 
Dotario's two needy nephews, Aurelio and a prodigal, 
Careless, succeed by various stratagems in marrying the 
two daughters, and not only are they reconciled to the 
reluctant father-in-law, but Careless receives back his for- 
feited lands and Aurelio becomes Dotario's avowed heir. 
Dotario thus plays a role somewhat similar to the senior 
Plodall in ^¥^ly Beguiled, in being, if not precisely a usurer, 
yet an undesirable and avaricious person whose overthrow 
is as welcomed as the usurer's, especially when he stands 
in the way of a charming maiden and her needy lover. A 
still closer adherence to the plot of Wily Beguiled is to be 
found in William Cartwright's The Ordinary, of 1634. 
Here, again, the one usurer has the customary rebellious 
and attractive daughter, and the other, the almost as fre- 
quent foolish son. It is planned that these two shall marry, 
but the hero, whose father in this case has been undone by 
the first usurer, tricks the son of the other into marrying 
the daughter's maid, succeeds, of course, in marrying the 
daughter himself, and thus, in addition to humiliating both 
usurers, recovers his ancestral estates. The more frequent 
disposal of the usurer's son is to marry him off to a cour- 
tesan, a fate, indeed, sometimes meted out to the usurer 
himself. Such is the case in Middleton's well-known A 
Trick to Catch the Old One, of 1606, the first play, I 
believe, in which two usurers appear. Here the prodigal, 
Witgood, recovers his mortgages by persuading a- usurious 
uncle. Lucre, into believing that he is about to marry an 
heiress — in reality his mistress. The other usurer, Hoard, 
is cozened into marrying the woman, who seems to have 
deserved a better fate, and Witgood recovers the mort- 
gages from Lucre and marries Hoard's niece. 



THE USURER IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 203 

This play, however, has made use of a device that really 
should be regarded as part of what may be called the 
second main usurer plot. This second type appeared first 
in Jach Drum's Entertainment, written probably as early 
as 1600. Here the usurer, whose " great nose " and some 
of whose speeches recall Shylock,^^ and whose villainy re- 
minds one less specifically of Barabas, is a bachelor and 
suitor for the hand of a young heiress. The needy hero 
appears as her true-love, however, and achieves the two- 
fold purpose of practically all usurer plays, the confusion 
of the usurer and the financial salvation of himself, by the 
eventual marriage of the rich heroine. This second plot 
is used in Beaumont and Fletcher's The Scornful Lady, 
of 1609, with the substitution of '' a rich widow " for the 
young heiress, and with the addition, borrowed from the 
other type of play, of making the prodigal the usurer's 
(rather willing) victim. In fact, the amazing final con- 
version of the usurer Morecraft, against which Dryden 
protested in his " Essaj^ of Dramatic Poesy," may be evi- 
dence of a still further attempt to make use of elements 
in the older type of plot."^ A variation of this device for 
the overthrow of the bachelor or widower usurer forms a 
sub-plot for Beaumont and Fletcher's Rule a 'Wife and 
Have a Wife, of 1624; it is the main plot of Shirley's The 
Wedding, of 1626, save that the successful lover is here 
the companion, not the debtor of the usurer; and it plays 
no small part in Shirley's The Constant Maid, of 1636- 
1639. 

In this last play, however, are to be found several varia- 
tions of older roles and situations that had by 1636 become 

^ See Simpson's School of Shakespeare, vol. ii, p. 208. 

" It has been suggested that Morecraft owes something to Demea 
of the Adelphi. See Variorum Edition of the Works of Beaumont 
and Fletcher, edited by E. W. Bond, vol. i, p. 360. 



204 AKTHUB BIVINS STONEX 

common property. As early as Fletcher and Kowley's Wit 
at Several Weapons, of 1608, the function of the rebellious 
daughter had been transferred to the equally oppressed 
and resourceful niece and ward of the usurer. The rich 
gull, as intended husband, and the poor scholar, as suc- 
cessful lover, reappear in this play nevertheless. The 
usurious guardian and the elusive ward persist in Jonson's 
The Staple of News, 1625, and in his The Magnetic Lady, 
1632, in D'Avenant's The Wits, of 1634, and in Shirley's 
omnium gatherum. The Constant Maid, of 1636. And the 
foolish or loathsome intended husband and the successful 
prodigal, or at least poor lover, are equally persistent. 

Ward and niece did not exhaust the possibilities of the 
role of the rebellious daughter. The usurer's wife had been 
cleverly utilized as far back as 1603 in Middleton's 
Michaelmas Term. Here the young prodigal. Easy, loses 
his property to the usurer, Quomodo, but as if in return, 
wins the affections of the usurer's wife. Quomodo, ignor- 
ant of this fact, feigns death, to see how his widow and 
worthless son will bear their loss. The wife promptly 
marries Easy, and through the gullibility of the son and 
the chicanery of her husband's traitorous accomplice, is 
enabled to return Easy's money to him. Just who retains 
the lady after Quomodo's indignant return to life is not 
clear. This making a cuckold of the usurer was another 
much relished punishment. The next year it was em- 
ployed in Eastward Hoe; and in Westwojrd Hoe, of 
1603 or 1604, the usurer, Tenterhooke, escapes it only 
bv the last-hour faithfulness of his wife, as a reward 
possibly for his exceptional virtues. He is one of the 
very few kindly disposed usurers in the drama of the 
period, and is almost the only decent character in the 
play in which he appears. The earliest use of this highly 
popular humiliation of the usurer that I have found is in 



THE USURER IN ELIZABETHAN DEAMA 205 

Chapman's revolting The Blind Beggar of Alexandria, 
1596. Inasmuch as the bigamous usurer inflicts this pun- 
ishment upon himself, in his second role of Count Hermes, 
he can scarcely be regarded as having suffered severely. 
In No ^Yit, No Help Like a Woman's, of 1613, Middleton 
introduced a real v^idow of a usurer to compensate the 
wife of one of her deceased husband's victims and to marry 
the customary young prodigal, vs^ho is here a needy brother- 
in-law of the victim. 

The wife of an enforced marriage was twice used, first 
in Beaumont and Fletcher's bewildering play, The Night 
Walker or the Little Thief, of 1614, where as in The Hog 
Hath Lost His Pearl, of the year before, false magic is 
also employed to bring about the usurer's overthrow and 
conversion. And to the same ends, his deserted wife is also 
introduced. An unwilling bride and an illegitimate child 
were similarly utilized in Richard Brome's The English 
Moor, or the Mock Marriage, of 1636; and the year after 
The Night Walker, in a play called The Honest Lawyer, 
written by an unknown "S. S.," false magic, robbery, a 
prodigal's deserted wife sought as mistress by the usurer, 
the revelation of attempted murder, and the usurer'ia 
worthy son were all marshaled to save the prodigal and to 
overwhelm the usurer. Gripe, whose name even is bor- 
rowed.^"* A more edifying reformation through the agency 
of another worthy son is wrought in Thomas May's The 
Old Couple, of 1619. Here the usurer. Earthworm, is 
publicly credited through the agency of the son with 
charitable deeds really performed by the son, and is so 
raised in general esteem thereby that the neighbors come 
to his aid when his dwelling catches fire. This mark of 

" Wycherley also gives this name to a usurer. See his Love in a 
Word. 



206 ARTHUR BIVINS STONEX 

affection touches Earthworm's heart and wins him away 
from his evil courses. 

The device for converting the usurer in the above play 
is far removed, it must be granted, from the device of the 
more typical plots, for a worthy son fulfils the functions 
of the rebellious daughter; and the usurer is not humil- 
iated, gulled, or robbed. And John Cook's Greene s Tu 
Quoque, or the City Gallant, of 1609 to 1612, also departs 
from the more usual plays, for retribution is as tardy as 
in Middleton's No Wit, No Help Like a Woman's. In 
this play compensation is afforded by a nephew who in 
a sense combines two roles, that of Middleton's widow and 
that of the persistent foolish son of the usurer. Staines, a 
prodigal, has forfeited his property to a usurer, Whirlpit. 
The usurer dies soon after the beginning of the play and 
leaves his wealth to his nephew. Bubble, who was at the 
first Staines's servant. Staines then becomes Bubble's 
servant and steward and by fraud and by leading Bubble 
into profligacy secures not only his own forfeited estate 
but practically lall that Bubble has inherited. Thus at the 
end the characters are returned to their proper status; 
and the scandal of a gentleman acting as a servant and of 
a servant posing as 'a gentleman is saved by the gentleman's 
dexterous cheating. Another career in this highly immoral 
play is more conventional and, if possible, more disgraceful. 
There is a second prodigal, Spendall, who by gambling, 
debauchery, and silly lavishness runs through the property 
that has been given him by his former master, a mercer. 
He is then rescued from the imprisonment he manifestly 
deserves by the inevitable rich widow. 

Before passing to those plays that represent the plagiar- 
istic climax of the usurer drama, it may be of interest 
to analyze in some detail the elements in one of the most 
deviously compounded and justly celebrated of all the 



THE USURER IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 207 

plays of the class, Massinger's A New Way to Pay Old 
Debts, first acted sometime before 1626. Sir Giles Over- 
reach, in the magnitude of his extortions, the terribleness 
of his villainy, his willingness to use his daughter's charms 
to gain his ends, and his final attempt to kill her, in his 
seldom failing resourcefulness, his dignity, and in his 
fearful fate reminds one inevitably of Marlowe's usurious 
villain, Barabas. His early love for his daughter, and 
her elopement, on the other hand, go back unmistakably 
to The Merchant of Venice. The usurer's traitorous ac- 
complice, Marrall, had a possible prototype in Ithamore of 
The Jew of Malta, or more possibly in Churms of Wily 
Beguiled. Wellborn, " a Prodigal," who repents his wild 
ways and promises reform, after his lands have been re- 
gained by fraud, had become a familiar character in the 
usurer play. His " new way to pay old debts," indeed is 
not so very new, for the trick of making his creditors think 
he is about to marry " a rich Widow " (who needs no in- 
troduction to the readers of this paper) had been utilized 
by Witgood in Middleton's A Trick to Catch the Old One 
nineteen years before.^^ Overreach's extortionate de- 
vices are not unlike those of the usurer, Shafton, in 
Heywood's A Woman Killed With Kindness.^^ And there 
are even verbal reminiscences of an earlier play.^"^ ISTever- 
theless, Massinger has combined these themes, characters, 
and situations so deftly, has given to his hero-villain so 
much eloquence ^and Mario wesque impressiveness, and has 

** For a discussion of Massinger's indebtedness see E. Koeppell, 
Quellen-Studien, p. 138. Brander Matthews, however, says " it is 
not at all unlikely that Massinger may have owed nothing to Mid- 
dleton's play " ( C. M. Gayley's Representative English Comedies, vol. 
m, p. 316). 
^ Cf . rn, i, 58 of the latter play with ii, i, 2-48 of Massinger's. 
="Cf. 

. . . and when mine ears are pierced with widows' cries. 
And undone orphans wash with tears my threshold. 



208 AETHUK BIVINS STONEX 

written all in such adequate verse that he must be given 
credit for having written not only an original but a 
thoroughly fine play. 

We have seen the growth and the almost endless rami- 
fication of two fairly distinct usurer plots, that is, devices 
for overthrowing and humiliating the usurer ; the introduc- 
tion of a rebellious daughter who characteristically elopes 
with her father's prodigal debtor, and the introduction of 
an heiress, maiden or rich widow, in the pursuit of whose 
hand and fortune the usurer is ignominiously defeated, 
ordinarily by one of his young prodigal victims. The 
last logical step in the evolution of the usurer plots was, 
of course, the combining of these two devices into one plot. 
Several of the plays already described have in one way or 
other come close to effecting the inevitable union, but so 
far as I can discover, the first to do so completely was 
Rowley (and Middleton's) A Match at Midnight, " re- 
vised " in 1623. 

In this play the crafty and repellent usurer, Blood- 
hound, has a daughter, Moll, whom he intends to bestow 
as a reward upon his loathsome accomplice, Earlock, a 
scrivener. Moll, however, elopes in due course and, as 
a culminating bit of poetic justice, carries off the mortgage 
on her lover's property. And, in addition. Bloodhound 
loses the ubiquitous " rich widow." Other old familiar 
faces appear. There is the usurer's foolish son who meets 
the approved fate of marriage to a trull. And the profligate 
son appears, too, but his role is given a somewhat original 
turn. He, of course, wooes, and for a time seems to win 

{New Way to Pay Old DeUs, iv, i, 127-128) and 

You lothe the widow's or the orphans tears 

Should wash your pavements, or their piteous cries 

Ring in your roofs. 

(Jonson's Volpone, i, i, 50-52). 



THE USURER IN ELIZABETHAN DRAMA 209 

the widow his father is courting, but when the " widow's " 
liusbaud unexpectedly appears, — ^shade of Quomodo in 
Michaelmas Term — the prodigal repents and reforms with- 
out his accustomed reward. 

This ingenious compilation was not long denied the 
flattery of imitation. In 1625, Shirley hit upon it for the 
framework of his Love Tricks, but not without notable 
contributions of his own. The usurer, Ruf aldo, has an even 
more humiliating love venture, and, incredible as it may 
seem, the young prodigal who carries off his daughter also 
plays the role of the elusive heiress whom the usurer would 
wed, and thus is able in his own person to achieve a double 
victory over the villain and to give him an unmerciful 
trouncing besides. This amazing denouement is thus ef- 
fected. Ruf aldo is betrothed to Selina, who runs away dis- 
guised in the clothes of her brother Antonio. He, in love 
with the usurer's closely watched daughter, Hilaria, gains 
access to her and to her father's house by donning in turn 
his sister Selina's clothes, and appearing as the usurer's 
bride. After the mock wedding, the beating takes place. 
Antonio and Hilaria are made happy, and we learn that 
in the meantime Selina has married her true-love Infor- 
tunio. 

The possibilities of this combination of plots evidently 
appealed to Shirley, for in The Constant Maid, written 
sometime between 1636 and 1639, he recurred to it, but 
this time with scarcely so original variations. It is a niece 
and ward in this play who finally eludes the clutches of 
her usurious uncle and guardian, Hornet, to marry the 
young Playfair. Hornet, moreover, loses a rich widow as 
usual, but under circumstances less ingeniously humiliat- 
ing and painful than those utilized in the preceding play. 
One notes with surprise that the rich widow is not be- 
stowed on, possibly, one of Playfair's profligate compan- 



210 ARTHUR BIVINS STONEX 

ions; Shirley, witli unwonted inattention to opportunity 
and precedent, seems to leave her quite unprovided for at 
the end of the play. And one misses also the usurer's 
foolish son with his accustomed bride, or indeed, a profli- 
gate son who could have taken care of the widow. 

If only these had been there, and a group of sharpers 
borrowed from Middleton, one or two corrupt Serjeants 
and justices, a rascally lawyer, a broker, a vile scrivener 
possibly as the daughter's intended husband, and, may be, 
a starved servant, pale descendant of the famished Launce- 
lot Gobbo, this play could have stood not only as an epitome 
of three-fourths of the usurer plays of the preceding ninety 
years, but also as a concluding illustration of the eclectic 
and synthetic practices of certain Elizabethan compound- 
ers of plays. 

Arthur Bivins Stonex. 



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